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(05/19/11 2:00am)
This may be the last column I write for The Dartmouth. A big thanks goes out to everybody editors, students, staff and citizens who lent their attention, in one way or another, to this rather ramshackle venture in amateur opinion writing.
(05/06/11 2:00am)
Overpopulation is not a subject much discussed in the present day for good reason. By now, it is a problem associated with authoritarian solutions. After the horrifying forced abortions of China's "One Child Policy" and the terrifying prospect at least for men of forced vasectomies courtesy of Indira Gandhi, the movement to curb overpopulation seemed to have lost steam in the early '80s. In fact, I thought it was a completely dead issue, until I read an article in The New York Times on Monday reporting that the United Nations predicts the world population to increase to 10.1 billion people by 2100. Within the last dozen years, we've already added another billion people to the population, reaching 7 billion total. If birthrates don't change, the UN projects that the population of Africa already so wounded by AIDS, wars and famines will triple. On a smaller scale, the population of Yemen, which already faces "critical water shortages," will quadruple.
(04/21/11 2:00am)
In reading the comments on Peter Blair's recent column on Jane Austen ("Austen's Power," April 19th), I was struck as I continually am by the difference in the way I read books compared to my peers. Some of those who commented cited the outdated gender roles evident in Austen's novels as a chief reason for why they disliked them. They argued that her books were irrelevant in our present cultural situation. But when students write such things, it seems that they don't enjoy reading at least not in any meaningful sense. If you read for the sake of seeing your own political views reflected back at to you, and not for the sake of enjoying the sublime, the beautiful and the purely entertaining, can you even be said to be reading at all?
(04/07/11 2:00am)
Our generation is largely focused on agreement. We're not a group that defines ourselves through dissent as those who came of age in the '60s did, and with the rise of the internet's ability to create an even more extensively shared mass culture than TV, it has become all the easier to plug into the same matrix of social enthusiasms. But everything has its downside the '60s dissent mentality spurred ineffectuality, in which smoking pot and listening to sweet music often substituted for more sober and sane forms of political action. The downside of our generation's mentality is that we tend to underrate the value of conflict. By "conflict," I don't mean physical struggle, I mean simply the clash of irreconcilable positions through debate and mental warfare.
(02/24/11 4:00am)
Increasingly, many politicians have called for and attempted to institute austerity measures. The citizens of the United States seem loathe to put up with this, despite recently electing so many of the people calling for these measures and cutbacks. Even our closest allies Britain and Germany exhorted President Barack Obama to begin making these kinds of changes, for the sake of the world economy. I think these measures may very well be necessary but it is disappointing that the American people, particularly the more privileged ones and the upper middle class, don't take more of a soft-core ascetic regime upon themselves in the first place. The government is constantly forced to delegate from above what we should force upon ourselves.
(02/09/11 4:00am)
My favorite part of The Dartmouth aside from the opinion page, of course is the overheards. The overheards are ultimately more than just a fun snapshot of collegiate excesses and buffoonery although they are, undoubtedly, that too. A deeper analysis is required. What the overheads truly are, in a sense, are notes for a performance (college life) handed out to all of the actors (us) beforehand. They not only diagram our patterns of conversation usually connected to the Greek houses or pong but give us those patterns as well, prepackaged for use. And yet, the overheards manifest a strangely "knowing" quality they seem to understand the fundamental core of absurdity and futility underlying all modern collegiate life, even if the actual people speaking the overheards are totally oblivious to it.
(01/27/11 4:00am)
"Life is a bitchin' party ..." "Life sucks ..."
(01/13/11 4:00am)
I have previously written that the war in Afghanistan has gone on for far too long. I still feel like that's true but I don't think the reason that Americans are only half-heartedly supporting this war is the absence of a truly evil enemy. The problem, I think, is actually too much moral ambiguity an unnecessary amount. Everything I've ever read about the situation in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region confirms for me that the Taliban are mini-Hitlers, suicide bombing Sufi shrines and throwing acid in the faces of schoolgirls. The Taliban are not "just the way people are over there," as I think many Americans secretly or not so secretly believe. They're a malign and viral presence.
(11/29/10 4:00am)
I have a considerable amount of nostalgia for the 19th century. This is possibly misplaced after all, we have abolished slavery, discovered penicillin, etc. But, I suppose the thing that I look back on as being of worth has more to do with personal development with what kind of human beings we're trying to create. Obviously, social and medical conditions have improved immensely. No argument there. But there is a notable lack of self-cultivation in the world today. By "self-cultivation" I simply mean the age-old formula of forcing human beings to gain some measure of control over their own minds, by forcing those minds to adopt certain patterns of thought. In the West, this traditionally took the form of doing things like memorizing parts of The Iliad in the original Greek. In the East, it took the form of epic recitations of great poems like the Ramayana, yogic practice, tai chi, etc. In the Islamic world, people still routinely memorize the Koran in its entirety. And so memory, I believe, is the key to what we are missing.
(11/10/10 4:00am)
If I were to run for political office and wave around a copy of L. Ron Hubbard's "Dianetics," it would no doubt ruin me. But if I waved around a copy of Ayn Rand's no less insane "Atlas Shrugged" I would find support rushing toward me from all quarters from Rush Limbaugh, Ron Paul and even many supposedly liberal Dartmouth students. The Ayn Rand virus is one of the most pernicious in the world today. Politicians regularly tout her ideas yet these ideas led her to make outrageous moral judgments.
(10/26/10 2:00am)
I've been having trouble, lately, throwing myself into the struggle. I realize that we currently have a massive political battle going on, which will determine our national destiny, but I have been approaching it more as a farce, by which I am entertained, than as a battle in which I am a participant. This is an unhappy state of affairs. I can try to explain why and hope that, instead of being only an isolated exercise in self-introspection, it can also reflect a wider sense of unease a sense of the hollowness at the heart of most political struggle. It might indicate a way of filling that void too, but I make no claims to wisdom.
(10/13/10 2:00am)
I have only seen "Jersey Shore" a couple of times, and on every occasion I was immediately bored and nauseated, and found myself wishing I was elsewhere. (The moon would not be far enough.) But the "characters"/real people on "The Shore" were not what nauseated me such grotesques populate the fringes of every conscious person's existence and one ought to treat them kindly, as a rule. What nauseated me was the fact that the viewing public was probably, on the whole, watching the show in order to have bemused contempt for idiots. If Orwell's "1984" had the "Five Minutes of Hate," we can be rightly said to possess our own "Hour of Snickering Contempt."
(09/28/10 2:00am)
A little less than nine months into 2010, we are already experiencing the bloodiest year for the American military in Afghanistan. As Stalin is said to have keenly observed, the death of many is a statistic while the death of one is a tragedy (leaving us with 358 individual American tragedies this year to date in Operation Enduring Freedom). And yet, that statistic seemed to pass without remark, without much protest or fanfare. And let's not forget the significantly higher number of innocent Afghans caught in the crossfire.
(09/15/10 2:00am)
The desire to escape the prison of our minds is universal.
(03/03/10 4:00am)
There's nothing quite so amusing as "the conversation" that is, the conversation about race, sex and other universally divisive issues that we are always urged to have, but never really can have. Last week, a prime specimen of this overwhelming futility presented itself, ready for dissection. I mean, of course, the signs posted and lingerie angrily strewn about the steps of three Greek houses ("Signs contend Greek orgs. are racist, sexist," Feb. 25). I take it for granted that everyone thinks this was a silly and unskillful way to communicate a point, and I agree. And it wasn't just the way the point was communicated that made it ridiculous, but the point itself was off-balance I mean, going after Chi Gamma Epsilon for a shirt printed in 2007, when no current members were responsible for the shirts? It exemplifies reasons why we can't listen to each other, even in more civilized quarters, when we talk about gender and race.
(02/18/10 4:00am)
Since I first arrived at Dartmouth in the Fall of 2007, I have been vaguely aware that there is a conflict swirling around the um, Board of Trustees or something? And there was some kind of lawsuit, and there have been controversial petition candidates, and every now and then, there is a new round of columns and letters to the editor I have to avoid reading. Recently, I gave in and read a couple of these letters to the Editor online. I realized "Wow, people really care about this stuff! Look at all the comments." And then I asked myself, "Why don't I?" This was a rhetorical question.
(02/12/10 4:00am)
Of the three big weekends, Winter Carnival is my least favorite. Its particular flavor of debauchery is so different from the renewal of tradition characterizing Homecoming, or the smooth, mellow elixir of Green Key. Winter Carnival always struck me as a mad scramble to soak up the last remaining bits of winter pleasure the student body, half-stricken with Seasonal Affective Disorder, feverishly laps up the last traces of mindless sex and intoxicants from the frosty and barren earth.
(02/03/10 4:00am)
Although I like to devote a minimum of my mental energy to politics, I was pleased to discover that President Barack Obama's new budget eliminates funding for future moon exploration. I, for reasons I will soon explain, am highly opposed to any and all physical journeys to the moon. I'm also opposed to bombing the moon (which is something NASA did a short time ago in search of water) and otherwise molesting it. I am glad that the moon has returned to its rightful place as a big glowing circle in the sky that controls the tides, and isn't subject to the prodding fingers of mankind, whose reach always insists on exceeding its grasp.
(01/21/10 4:00am)
The noted public intellectual Louis Menand recently authored a book entitled "The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Reaction in the American University." Menand argues that the 19th Century creation of the research university caused professors to seal themselves off from the world, retreating into their own abstruse interests. Former Harvard President Charles Eliot, who pioneered the creation of the research university, was trying to liberate academics from religious obligations and other restrictions holding sway at the time. He wanted to prevent new and original scholarship from being stifled, to create a community of free scholars his goal was to encourage useful ideas without restrictions from ideology.
(01/06/10 4:00am)
New Year's Day marked the birthday of literary legend, J.D. Salinger, now 91 years of age and author of the much beloved "The Catcher in the Rye" as well as other works that equal or excel its luster. Mr. Salinger is also a neighbor to Dartmouth, living in nearby Cornish, N.H., and although it is well known that he appreciates his privacy, students occasionally claim to spot him in Baker-Berry Library. I feel it necessary to joyously paste the opinion page of The D with an outburst of affection for both his work and the thoroughly admirable way in which he lives his life. I would also like to disperse what I feel are a few grave misconceptions surrounding him and his books.